Ever since Apple announced new privacy features included in the release of OS 14, Facebook has waged a war against the company, arguing that these new features will adversely effect small businesses and their ability to advertise online. What makes these attacks so “laughable” is not just Facebook’s disingenuous posturing as the protector of small businesses, but that their campaign against Apple suggests privacy and business are fundamentally opposed to each other. This is just plain wrong. We’ve said it before and we’ll say is again: Privacy is good for business.
In June, Apple announced that their new mobile operating system, OS 14, would include a feature called “AppTrackingTransparency” that requires apps to seek permission from users before tracking activity between others apps and websites. This feature is a big step towards prioritizing user control of data and the right to privacy. However, in the months following Apple’s announcement, Facebook has waged a campaign against Apple and their new privacy feature. In a blog post earlier this month, Faceboook claims that “Apple’s policy will make it much harder for small businesses to reach their target audience, which will limit their growth and their ability to compete with big companies.”
And Facebook didn’t stop there. They even took out full-page ads in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post to make their point.
Facebook criticizes Apple’s iOS privacy changes with full-page newspaper ads https://t.co/KO1rUCNAC6 pic.twitter.com/G2WsXpZ6uV
— The Verge (@verge) December 16, 2020
Given the fact that Facebook is currently being sued by more than 40 states for antitrust violations, there is some pretty heavy irony in the company’s stance as the protector of small business. Yet, this is only scratches the surface of what Facebook gets wrong in their attacks against Apple’s privacy features.
While targeted online adverting has been heralded as a more effective way for business to reach new audiences and start turning a profit, the groups that benefit the most from these highly-targeted ad practices are in reality gigantic data brokers. In response to Facebook’s attacks, Apple released a letter, saying that “the current data arms race primarily benefits big businesses with big data sets.”
The privacy advocacy non-profit, Electronic Frontier Foundation, reenforced Apple’s point and called Facebook’s claims “laughable.” Start ups and small business, used to be able to support themselves by running ads on their website or app. Now, however, nearly the entire online advertising ecosystem is controlled by companies like Facebook and Google, who not only distribute ads across platforms and services, but also collect, analyze and sell the data gained through these ads. Because these companies have a strangle hold on the market, they also rake in the majority of the profits. A study by The Association of National Advertisers found that publishers only get back between 30 and 40 cents of every dollar spent on ads. The rest, the EFF says, “goes to third-party data brokers [like Facebook and Google] who keep the lights on by exploiting your information, and not to small businesses trying to work within a broken system to reach their customers.”
Because tech giants such as Facebook have overwhelming control on online advertising practices, small businesses that want to run ads have no choice but to use highly-invasive targeting methods that end up benefitting Facebook more than these small businesses. Facebook’s claim that their crusade against Apple’s new privacy features is meant to help small businesses just simply doesn’t hold water. Instead, Facebook has a vested interest in maintaining the idea that privacy and business are fundamentally opposed to one another because that position suits their business model.
At the end of the day, the problem facing small business is not about privacy. The problem is the fundamental imbalance between a handful of gigantic tech companies and everyone else. The move by Apple to ensure all apps are playing by the same rules and protecting the privacy of their users is a good step towards leveling the playing field and thereby actually helping small business grow.
This also shows the potential benefits of a federal, baseline privacy regulation. Currently, U.S. privacy regulations are enacted and enforced on the state level, which, while a step in the right direction, can end up staggering business growth as organizations attempt to navigate various regulations with different levels of requirements. In fact, last year CEOs sent a letter to congress urging the government to put in place federal privacy regulations, saying that “as the regulatory landscape becomes increasingly fragmented and more complex, U.S. innovation and global competitiveness in the digital economy are threatened” and that “innovation thrives under clearly defined and consistently applied rules.”
Lastly, we recently wrote about how consumers are more willing to pay more for services that don’t collect excessive amounts of data on their users.This suggests that surveillance advertising and predatory tracking do not build customers, they build transactions. Apple’s new privacy features open up a space for business to use privacy-by-design principles in their advertising and services, providing a channel for those customers that place a value on their privacy.
Privacy is not bad for business, it’s only bad for business models like Facebook’s. By leveling the playing field and providing a space for new, privacy-minded business models to proliferate, we may start to see more organizations realize that privacy and business are actually quite compatible.